Strangers on the Mountain

They had lived in the woodlands, twenty-five miles from New York City, for generations. Why were people so afraid of them?

On the morning of April 1, 2006, Harold Dennison went for a ride on his all-terrain vehicle in the woods surrounding his house on Stag Hill Road, in Mahwah, New Jersey. Mahwah occupies the northwest corner of Bergen County, where the Ramapo Mountains, stony foothills of the Appalachian range, loom over the intersection of routes 287, 17, and 87. It was one of the last towns in the region to succumb to suburban sprawl, and, although the old valley farms along the Ramapo River have mostly been replaced by million-dollar estates and cul-de-sacs with names like Stabled Way and Polo Lane, Stag Hill, about twenty-five miles from midtown Manhattan, remains a kind of world apart. Roosters far outnumber spaniels, and spare tires and rusting appliances vie for scenic predominance. Area teen-agers, recalling decades-old legends of unsuspecting people who climbed Stag Hill and never returned, dare one another to drive up at night. Dennison’s and his cousins’ families—the Manns, the Van Dunks, the De Groats, the De Freeses—have lived and hunted there for generations.

Most of the Ramapo Mountain woodlands, extending from Pompton Lakes, south of Mahwah, up to West Point, on the Hudson River, are now preserved as parks, where A.T.V.s are prohibited. But Stag Hill has traditionally been left alone, and blazed hiking trails steer clear of the residences by at least a mile in any direction. Dennison brought a switchblade with him, as well as a .22-calibre handgun, which he kept in a holster on his right side. He planned to take some target practice at one of the abandoned cars nearby, or, if he got lucky, to bag a deer or a wild turkey or some smaller game. “Basically, he was doing what every American kid does: go out in the woods and shoot off a couple of rounds,” his lawyer later argued. “It’s as American as apple pie.” Not in New Jersey. Dennison, a married man in his late fifties, soon ran into three park rangers, two men and a woman, who had wandered out of their jurisdiction during an “area familiarization” patrol, conducted on A.T.V.s of their own. They stopped him, and discovered that the handgun, for which he had no license, was loaded with hollow-point bullets, sometimes known as “cop killers.”

Word of the arrest spread quickly. Deep in the woods, near the ruins of an old goat farm, some of Dennison’s neighbors and relatives were gathering for a birthday cookout. Ancestors of the present-day Mann family once worked the farm. Now everyone referred to the spot as the German house, and scattered shotgun shells and broken beer bottles marked it as a common meeting place, for grilling venison or mackerel or bluegill. By late afternoon, when the rangers returned to the woods after booking Dennison at the Mahwah police department, many of the picnickers had dispersed, but those who remained began to feel as though they were under siege. A father and son were cut off while riding their A.T.V.s home, and the boy’s vehicle was struck by one of the rangers’. “You don’t belong on this mountain,” the boy complained.

A couple of electric-company workers investigating a low-hanging wire on the top of a nearby power line passed the German house and warned the stragglers about cops in the area. A small man standing beside a jug of wine told them that a hiker had got lost the day before. Ever since, he said, “rangers have been up here hassling us, and we’ve had enough of this shit.” He asked permission to throw rocks at the beacon on their truck as they drove away. “Have at it,” the driver said, not wanting to make trouble. Soon after, the workers crossed paths with the three rangers headed in the opposite direction, and waved.

The first ranger to arrive at the German house dismounted and ran down a slope behind the stone foundation of a barn, toward a man with a ponytail, whom she recognized as having buzzed by them on the trails shortly before. His name was Otis Mann. “No way. It’s not going to happen,” he said, resisting her attempts to pry his hands from his A.T.V. A second ranger came down the slope. Mann’s teen-age daughter got involved (“Leave my father alone!” she yelled. “What are you doing?”), and the scuffle escalated. Out came the pepper spray.

Emil Mann, the rock thrower, and a distant cousin of Otis’s, was hiding behind a tree, up the hill and out of sight. He tried to intercept the third ranger, who arrived at the clearing to the sound of screams from down below. “All this over A.T.V.s,” Emil said. “What’s wrong with you people?”

The utility workers heard two loud booms in quick succession as they approached the trailhead. A few minutes later, they encountered a frantic woman in a New Jersey State Parks Police S.U.V., who urged them to clear a path for an ambulance.

In the next half hour, a dozen police forces, from towns where teen drinking and vandalism are the principal concerns, converged on Stag Hill, shutting off the only paved road up the mountain, while, at the top, patrolmen began assembling assault rifles.

“Do they know who’s shooting?” a police dispatcher asked.

“Apparently it’s the mountain people up there.”

“Mountain people” is a euphemism for what locals used to call “Jackson Whites”—a racial slur that the referents equate with the word “nigger.” They call themselves Ramapough Mountain Indians, or the Ramapough Lenape Nation, using an old Dutch spelling for the name of the river that cuts through the Hudson and North Jersey Highlands, although suburban whites tend to think of them as racially indeterminate clansfolk. The Ramapoughs number a few thousand, marry largely among themselves, and are concentrated in three primary settlements: on and around Stag Hill, in Mahwah; in the village of Hillburn, New York, in the hollow below Stag Hill’s northern slope; and, west of Stag Hill, in Ringwood, New Jersey, in the remains of an old iron-mining complex. The settlements span two states and three counties—a circumstance with socially marginalizing consequences—but they are essentially contiguous if you travel through the woods, by foot or A.T.V.

Off-roaders in the Northeast are used to public indignities, and they track A.T.V. news on Web forums with a sense of resigned foreboding, as more of their favorite trails are closed to riding in the interest of environmental protection (“apparently we’re killing all sorts of endangered tadpoles when riding through small puddles and mud bogs”) and noise control. The Stag Hill shooting seemed to confirm their worst suspicions about how dire the situation had become. As it turned out, none of the people at the German house were armed, and the only two bullets that were fired landed in Emil Mann’s chest and left thigh. Outnumbered, unfamiliar with the terrain, and anxious from lingering visions of Harold Dennison’s arsenal, the three park rangers evidently rated the threat to their own safety more pressing than the condition of the bleeding victim. (“Yeah, we got a shitstorm coming here,” one said over his radio. “We’re on Stag Hill.”) In the commotion, another cousin, recognizing that an ambulance would never make it through the rocky trails, carried Mann to the nearest A.T.V., so that he could be delivered to the road, a mile away, where a helicopter was eventually able to land on a ball field for a medical evacuation. Otis Mann was taken to jail. At the hospital, Emil Mann was also placed under arrest. He died nine days later.

The initial comments on sites like ATVriders.com and thumpertalk.com reflected a unified sense of outrage: “Wow . . . all to save a tree,” and, “Sounds like people need to start boycotting NJ and just move away . . . a ranger SHOT a guy for riding an ATV?” Then people who were more familiar with the area noticed the victim’s name, and the location of the incident, and the Web commenters turned on their man and began to disavow. “This is going to give a great example of riders to the NJ public,” one wrote. “Like we already don’t have enough bad media.” Before long, the A.T.V. enthusiasts’ sentiments might easily have been confused with those of the pro-police posters at NJLawman.com. The riders alluded to the movie “Deliverance,” speculated that the Manns had been cooking meth, and shared stories about personal encounters with the “freakin monkeys” on Stag Hill, where it was rumored that martial law was in effect, with armed vigilantes driving around in pickup trucks. “Yes these people are known as the Jackson Whites,” one posted. “They are all inbreed lowlifes. The odds are they got what they deserved.” Another wrote, “Those so-called ‘Indians’ up there are nothing more than Gypsies who think they can do anything they want in the woods. . . . Mixed emotions here between the happiness of one scumbag dead, and the bad media circling around off-roaders AGAIN for no reason.”

The reaction of politicians was more sympathetic, owing to an environmental crisis near the iron mines of far greater magnitude than soil erosion from off-roading. Less than three months earlier, some six hundred Ramapoughs, represented by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., among others, had filed a mass tort suit against Ford Motor Company and its contractors, as well as the borough of Ringwood, for the dumping of toxic waste. From 1955 until 1980, Ford operated an assembly plant in Mahwah, memorialized in Bruce Springsteen’s “Johnny 99,” near the base of Stag Hill. For several years in the late sixties and early seventies, while the plant was turning out hundreds of Fairlanes and Galaxies a day, the automaker’s contractors poured millions of gallons of Rangoon Red and Brittany Blue paint sludge and other untreated waste into a Ringwood landfill adjacent to the former mining-company homes, as well as into a couple of the old mine holes. A few months before the lawsuit was filed, the Bergen Record published a five-part investigative series, titled “Toxic Legacy,” describing a wide variety of illnesses, from chronic nosebleeds to leukemia and rare autoimmune disorders, among the Ramapoughs in Ringwood. The paper conducted soil tests and found lead and antimony levels near some residences that were in excess of a hundred times the recommended safety limits, and photographed orange pools of benzene near a creek bed. (“Don’t worry, the paint sludge will kill off the low-lifes in Ringwood,” someone commented on ATVriders.com. “With the in-breeding the f**kers in Mahwah will eventually die too!! This place would be better off WITHOUT them!!”)

Governor Jon Corzine and Lisa Jackson, who was then the commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection, met with tribal leaders and promised a thorough investigation. A law partner of Barry Scheck’s attended Emil Mann’s funeral, and filed a civil-rights suit on behalf of Mann’s three children and their mother, Charlene Defreese. Coaxing the distrustful Ramapough witnesses to coöperate with the grand-jury investigation into the shooting proved difficult, however. As the months dragged on, more bad news came, from the health department, which issued a warning about squirrel meat—a staple of the Ringwood community’s diet—because of lead contamination related to the paint. Healthy adults were advised to limit their squirrel intake to two meals a week, and pregnant women and children to less than half that much. The squirrel situation caught the attention of David Letterman and Z-100 shock jocks, who saw an easy opportunity for humor, which in turn led to fights and suspensions at the Ringwood schools, where the Ramapough kids are sometimes called Mineys.

Emil Mann was in many respects an unlikely civil-rights martyr: forty-five, short, of medium build, and by all accounts unassuming—“meek,” even, as the town supervisor of Ramapo, New York, which includes the village of Hillburn, put it while exclaiming about the “evil” that had visited Stag Hill in the form of New Jersey State Parks Police, as the rangers are formally called. Mann had worked in parks, too, as a heavy-machine operator for the Ramapo Parks and Recreation Department. He came from a family of eleven kids. He loved cars and cooking. His brown hair and his mustache had recently turned gray, and had you seen him on a fishing trip, with his shades on, you might have guessed that he was Sicilian, or Puerto Rican. The indefinite appearance extended back through the family line: Second World War draft and enlistment papers identified his paternal grandfather as a “negro” with “light” complexion, and his father as white.

Yet the so-called “Jackson Whites” were once internationally known, the subject of syndicated newspaper columns and poems and Off Broadway plays, on account of their shockingly premodern isolation in such proximity to New York City—our own metropolitan hillbillies, living in hovels with views of the rising skyline. Red Smith, in covering the U.S. Open for readers as distant as Winnipeg, once wrote that a golfer had sliced his drive “into woods too deep for habitation save by raccoons and Jackson Whites.” And the London Times coverage of the Lindbergh baby’s disappearance, in 1932, included a report that state troopers had begun searching “the hill country, peopled sparsely by ‘Jackson Whites,’ which lies at the back of Colonel Lindbergh’s house.” William Carlos Williams’s “To Elsie” begins:

The pure products of Americago crazy—

mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of

Jersey

with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves

old names

and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men . . .

and young slatterns, bathed

in filth

from Monday to Saturday.

The poem was inspired by Williams’s mentally handicapped maid, who had come from a state orphanage and was descended, supposedly, from Ramapo-mountaineer stock—“expressing with broken brain the truth about us.”

Another source of lurid fascination, particularly as the eugenics movement gained momentum in the early decades of the twentieth century, was the group’s mysterious racial makeup. They were a “singular people,” as journalists were apt to put it, combining Indian, African, and European features: high cheekbones, aquiline noses, dark skin, red hair. Albert Payson Terhune, the best-selling children’s author (“Lad: A Dog”), lived in the Ramapo Valley and cast as villains in one of his novels these “blue-eyed niggers,” who “resembled East Indians more than any other race.”

Native Americans, naturally, accounted for the first ingredient in the popular conception of this uniquely local melting pot: Delaware, or Lenape, the original inhabitants of the mid-Atlantic region; and Tuscarora, who might have stopped off on their northward march to Oneida after losing a war with the settlers of North Carolina in 1714. The rocky and densely forested hills near the New York–New Jersey border provided cover from white encroachment and made it possible for some Indians to remain after the Treaty of Easton, in 1758, ostensibly banished them all to the West. Runaway Dutch slaves—an explanation for the common surnames De Groat, Van Dunk, De Freese—came next, according to received tradition, and introduced African blood to the gene pool. (From the New York Sun, in 1898: “When a negro once succeeded in hiding there he was as safe from recapture as if he had gone to Canada, although he might be within sight and sound of his master’s home.”) As the Revolutionary War turned in favor of the Colonials, the woods were presumed to have become a convenient safe haven for newer sets of undesirables: Hessian deserters from Colonel Johann Rall’s regiment after the Battle of White Plains, Tory sympathizers, and outlaw bandits from Claudius Smith’s gang. The nineteenth century, and the growth of industry, brought immigrant laborers—Italian woodcutters, Irish colliers and iron miners—to the mix. “It amounts to almost a crime in Bergen County to sell liquor to these people,” the Times wrote as the twentieth century began.

The true origin of the term “Jackson Whites” may be lost. Its earliest known appearance in print, in the Rockland County Journal, occurred in 1878, with no explanation of the etymology. According to one theory, the name derives from the nineteenth-century use of “jack” as slang for a runaway slave, and the original formulation may have been “jacks and whites,” which was corrupted in the repetition. A more fanciful notion traces the slur to the Presidential election of 1828, when Andrew Jackson was looking to expand the white-male voting population, and rounded up non-landowners and other mixed-race mountaineers who could pass.

But the theory that stuck, despite the lack of any documentary evidence, was the most vivid, and involved a British captain or general named Jackson, who contracted to supply the Redcoats garrisoned on Manhattan Island with some reliable entertainment to boost flagging morale in the late stages of the Revolutionary War. Jackson, as the story goes, was a pimp, and he filled twenty ships with England’s most dispensable women, from the slums of Liverpool, Southampton, and London, but one or two of the ships got lost or sank en route; for expediency’s sake, he then sent for replacements from the British West Indies. The whores were known to their eager clients in New York as “Jackson’s whites” and “Jackson’s blacks,” respectively. When the British defeat was imminent, and the time came to evacuate, the women fled west, across the Hudson, rather than return to sexual servitude. And by whom were the prostitutes first welcomed? By the Indians and slaves and Hessians and outlaws camped out in the hilly Ramapos—a dystopian colony of desperate characters in the making.

Among the publications that cited the prostitution fable as fact was this magazine, which in 1938 ran a feature by George Weller called “The Jackson Whites.” Weller, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for his Second World War reporting, conceded some difficulties in the assignment (“It is harder to find out something that happened in the Ramapo Mountains two generations ago than what happened in the Fiji Islands at the same period”), before giving exacting, though unsubstantiated, details about the prostitutes—“They all lived in a stockade in Lispenard’s Meadows, now a part of Greenwich Village”—and about Captain Jackson’s remuneration (seven thousand pounds for thirty-five hundred women). But Weller’s main focus lay elsewhere. Factories, summer bungalows, and Boy Scouts were crowding his subjects’ homeland and threatening not only their privacy but their distinct way of life. Several months before publication, Simon Mann, an elderly mountain dweller, had been struck dead by an automobile—a casualty of progress—while making his annual spring trip into the valley for tobacco and fishhooks. The previous winter, Long-Haired Bill Mann, who identified as a full-blooded Tuscarora Indian (“His face would have done for the side of a buffalo nickel, whatever his descent”), had died of old age. Weller visited with a seventy-seven-year-old medicine man named Uncle Will de Frees, whom he described as the lone remaining patriarch and one of two sons born to Aunt Abbie de Frees, a practicing witch. Once Will passed on, what would become of his plantain-redroot remedy for boils, or his sod-and-vinegar treatment for toothaches? “Oblivion is gathering around the Jackson Whites,” Weller concluded. “There is nothing Uncle Will de Frees or anyone else can do about it.”

Weller and other premature eulogizers underestimated the extent to which racial anxiety and isolation are self-reinforcing. In 1970, the Times published a story about the existence of a Stag Hill civic association, which was headed by Otto Mann, a grandson of Long-Haired Bill Mann; the story was accompanied by photographs of nine-year-old Emil Mann, the future shooting victim, fishing with a brother and a cousin, and of a snarling hound, along with the caption “A dog charged the photographer, who—much to his relief—was still inside his automobile.” Six years later, another Times account (“ANGER IN THE RAMAPOS”) mentioned that “on Stag Hill in Mahwah, a recent visitor was told not to linger or ask questions,” and recounted the story of another reporter’s car being run off the road by locals.

The year after the shooting, I drove up Stag Hill to have lunch with a daughter of Otto Mann. After more than a mile of steep, winding incline, of the sort that strains an old Honda Civic, I had to slow to let a family of wild turkeys pass. The ground levelled off at a baseball diamond, the spot where the helicopter had landed for the medevac. I continued on as far as the road would take me, another mile or so, passing dead-end side streets and, on the left, a spread of shanties and tarps, overlooking a lake. Eventually, I pulled into the driveway of a modest nineteenth-century house that had been painted white. A modified version of the Stars and Stripes, on which a wolf’s head had been superimposed, hung from a flagpole beside a toolshed. Ryan Mann, who had carried Emil’s body out of the woods, lived in the front of the house with his parents. His aunt Phyllis, a retired school-bus driver, lived in back.

“I wasn’t sure what kind of food you liked, so I opted for roasted chicken,” Phyllis said, showing me to a seat on a small, screened-in porch behind her kitchen. “I figure that’s safe for everybody.” She had short gray hair, and there was a faint hint of copper in her complexion. Her grandson Jason, who appeared to be in his teens, sat in the living room, which doubled as her bedroom, watching a video on a laptop. It was early fall, and the leaves on the mountaintop had begun to turn. A light breeze rustled the wind chimes on the porch, adding to the soundtrack of crowing roosters and roaring A.T.V.s in the distance.

This was the house Phyllis had grown up in, along with four brothers and five sisters. She raised her own four children on a street ringing the lake that I’d passed, and sold that place in the mid-nineties, after her husband died. “Today we’re living among strangers,” she said. “There’s strangers on the mountain. They call it progress.” She’d heard that the owner of her old house by the lake was hoping to get a huge amount for it. “They have plans for that road—big plans,” she said. The township had designated much of the area surrounding the lake as a protected watershed. The property with the shanties, a game-fowl farm, was facing zoning and health-code violations. Realtors could now refer safely to “the ever-changing Stag Hill area.”

Phyllis called out to Jason, “Are you going to eat with us?” He helped himself to a plate of food and returned to his computer. She said grace, and reminisced about hunting for crayfish and mushrooms, and spending her afternoons in the upper branches of the pine trees, many of them now felled, along the invisible state line. “I really, truly loved growing up up here,” she said. “It hurts when you hear these stories about our people being so backward.” Jason returned for dessert (berries and whipped cream), and declined once more to join us on the porch. “There’s still people today, they’ll say, ‘Oh, don’t go up there, they’ll kill you and boil you and eat you for supper,’ ” Phyllis went on. “You go on the computer and they don’t even say it’s the Ramapough Mountain Indians. They’ll say it’s the ‘Jackson Whites.’ Now, why don’t they get to know us before they say these things?”

The Ramapough Mountain Indians incorporated in 1978. The galvanizing event, for a group that had always been characterized by outsiders as disorganized and indifferent, was the publication of a book, “The Ramapo Mountain People,” which investigated the sources and validity of the folk legends, and concluded that they were mostly bunk: no Jackson, no hookers, no Hessians. Using baptismal and census records, the book’s author, a Rutgers professor named David Cohen, attempted to trace the movement of free “coloreds,” like Augustine Van Donck, from near the Collect Pond in lower Manhattan, in the seventeenth century, to the Hackensack River Valley and then to the Ramapo Mountains.

Cohen granted that individual Native Americans might have married into the new mountain families, but his thesis was that the people of the Ramapos were essentially “Afro-Dutch,” as he put it, and he suggested that their collective identification with Indian traits was itself a kind of internalized racism; not wishing to be black, they preferred to think of themselves as something rarer—as, indeed, the mainstream culture had always insisted they were. Still, he saw himself as an advocate for the people, and tried persuading them—“naïvely,” he now says—that they ought to embrace this new identity with pride: pioneering black landowners, among the first in the New World.

His subjects did not welcome the intrusion. Taking charge of their public identity for the first time, they cited stories, passed down by their ancestors, about retreating into the woods to dance around fires on a flat rock, and sacred traditions like sprinkling tobacco on pigs before a slaughter. They established a self-governing structure involving three clans—the Wolf, the Deer, and the Turtle—representing the families’ settlements in Mahwah, Hillburn, and Ringwood, respectively. New Jersey’s legislature passed a resolution acknowledging them as a tribe in 1980, but the federal vetting process, with its stricter standards of documentation, proved more difficult, and organized gambling interests in Atlantic City lobbied against them. “They sure as hell don’t look like Indians to me,” Donald Trump said in 1995, after a dozen Ramapoughs banged drums in front of his Manhattan office. The Bureau of Indian Affairs denied the Ramapoughs’ final petition three years later, ruling that they had failed to meet three of the seven criteria required for federal recognition.

One of the Trump Tower protesters is now the Ramapoughs’ elected chief, Dwaine Perry. When I first met him, he was standing outside the entrance to the tribal lodge, a one-story cinderblock building across the street from the Stag Hill ball field, and was using an eagle feather to waft smoke from a frying pan of burning sage and cedar, as part of a cleansing ceremony called smudging. Perry has weathered light-brown skin, hazel eyes, and a goatee, and wears his hair in a long, braided ponytail. “I’m an Indian chief, and on a clear day I can see the Empire State Building from my attic,” he said. “I recognize there’s kind of a dichotomy there.” He allowed that he and his people were sometimes regarded as “hippie Indians,” or “yuppie Indians,” by more well-known tribes out West. But, inside the lodge, a sun dancer from Montauk and elders from the Tutelo and Cherokee nations had come to pay their respects to the memory of Emil Mann, as had representatives of the Justice Department and the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. “They want to be able to co-exist,” Lydia Cotz, a lawyer who represents the tribe pro bono, told me. “But they need a blueprint.”

Not all of the recent strangers on the mountain were typical suburbanites. I later visited the home of the Çakirs, a Turkish family who began renting on another of the dead-end mountain roads in 1994, after living unhappily in the wealthy town of Upper Saddle River, in what the mother, Mihri, called an “executive neighborhood,” where she felt constantly condescended to, because of her foreign accent. “I had it with American housewives,” she told me, after putting some logs in her wood-burning stove and taking a seat by a large picture window, through which you could just make out a towering Sheraton hotel, where the old Ford plant used to be. “It was so pleasurable to live here, such a beautiful place. We told a couple of friends. They said, ‘Oh, Jackson Whites live there.’ We didn’t know anything about it. So the story goes, they are a mixture of white, black, and British prostitutes. Then I learned they are Ramapough Indians—very violent people, they are always shooting up here. This is what I’m hearing. ‘They don’t like to mingle with others.’ So we move here, and I’m trying to put this house together, but there are no services. The Post Office doesn’t bring anything to the house. No regular recycling or garbage. And I’m having a big fight with the town, that they are obliged to bring the services. So I called the town to request a recycling schedule. I said, ‘Make a Xerox copy and mail me one. And also, the Indians didn’t get any, neither.’ The lady said, ‘I don’t have to send them anything.’ I said, ‘Why?’ ‘Because they don’t know how to read and write.’ ”

Mihri demanded a meeting with Mahwah’s mayor, and learned that the township had money set aside for building a basketball court and a playground near the Stag Hill ball field, but none of the residents had expressed interest in claiming it, and the allotment would soon expire. She dropped by the tribal lodge and introduced herself. “I said, ‘This is where I live, I know you don’t want white people getting in your business, but I was in the mayor’s office, and he told me that you have some money there.’ And they got the park.”

Gradually, Mihri befriended a number of the Ramapough women. “We became family,” she said. “We drank together from time to time.” She learned that the Stag Hill residents, when applying for jobs, avoided giving their true addresses, fearing discrimination. Mihri is an anthropologist, and had done work with the Kurds, with whom she saw a number of parallels to her new neighbors, but the women told her about their unhappy experience with David Cohen, the Rutgers professor, so she confined her efforts to helping out with an after-school program. She found the boys threatening, but got along well with the girls, and conducted weekly reading lessons at her house. “We made brownies, we walked in the woods, I took them to museums in New York,” she said. For the most part, she didn’t explore the back roads—“I didn’t want to bother them just for my curiosity”—but on a couple of occasions she offered her tutees rides home. “You won’t believe the poverty,” she said. “It’s just right by our nose.”

Around 2000, Mihri said, new houses—“Home Depot houses,” she called them—started going up over on Split Rock Road, a neighboring street. “It’s kind of a new money,” she said. “This lady, all dressed up, riding her horse on a black tar road, O.K., and a cell phone in her hand. I have all the reasons not to like her.” She alluded to the pressure being put on the game-fowl farm, and said, “I don’t understand. How do chickens make more dirt in a farm than the lady’s horse on my street?”

A grand jury in Hackensack eventually indicted Chad Walder, the park ranger who shot Emil Mann, for reckless manslaughter—the first time an officer of the law had faced such a serious charge in Bergen County since 1991. “You almost feel sorry for the man,” Roger De Groat, a plaintiff in the environmental suit, told me one afternoon when I visited him in Ringwood. “I think they were scared, didn’t know how to handle the situation. You walk up to people, you have to do it right. Tell ’em, ‘You know, you can’t be here, and you have to leave.’ Don’t go up there all loud and stupid in front of somebody’s kids.” He shook his head. “I’m surprised more people didn’t get killed up there that day, boy.”

De Groat is a tall, genial, sixty-year-old man with silver hair and a prominent nose. He lives more than half a mile from the closest main road, near a concrete remnant of the hoist house from the Peters Mine, which was first dug around 1740 and eventually grew to seventeen levels, extending nearly two thousand feet below the ground. His home, a two-story, four-bedroom frame house with cracked yellow siding, was once the mine supervisor’s. There was a high fence around his front yard, which appeared overgrown with weeds. He’d been mowing his grass one afternoon in the summer of 2005, I learned, and had gone inside to fetch a wrench, then returned to find that a lawn chair and some irises had disappeared—swallowed by an unmarked mine shaft.

The E.P.A. mandated a Superfund cleanup of the mine area by Ford in the nineteen-eighties, and ordered further remediation beginning five years ago, leading to the removal of an additional thirty-five thousand tons of sludge and soil. De Groat’s sinkhole served as a reminder of the difficulties involved in an ongoing operation that required moving large quantities of earth around an inhabited site that was pocked with barely concealed cavities which had never been charted all that well to begin with. The mine area is clearly not at risk of gentrification, but displacement, for safety and other reasons, is nevertheless an ongoing concern. Seventeen months after De Groat lost his lawn furniture, the earth threatened to claim a pair of houses on Van Dunk Lane, across the street from where his twin brother, Bob, lives, and two dozen residents were forced to evacuate. Bob’s ten-year-old son had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, some years back, and his granddaughter was beset with nosebleeds. They’d found pink, blue, and gray clumps of sludge in his front yard.

Back when the dumping was going on, forty years ago, the De Groat boys used to scavenge the freshly discarded piles of junk for carburetors and copper snakes to sell on the side of the road. “After the trucks come, the dust was so thick you couldn’t see your hand,” Roger said. “We didn’t know anything about chemicals back then.” A few hundred yards from Bob’s current house was an old sledding hill that the neighborhood kids used to ride down while sitting on detached car hoods. They called it Sludge Hill. Now, on the remediation contractors’ maps, it was SR-6, as in Sludge-Removal Site No. 6.

“We got our situation here with the paint sludge and stuff, and they got their problem over there with Emil,” De Groat said, nodding east toward Stag Hill, where his father grew up. “But you know what? It’s a crazy thing. There’s a silver lining already, because Governor Corzine signed some paper that has to do with the Native Americans.” He was referring to a recent executive order endorsing the recommendations of an eighty-page report from the state’s new Committee on Native American Community Affairs, which affirmed the Ramapoughs’ continued existence as “descendants of Munsee-speaking groups, i.e., Lenape-Delawares,” and vowed to improve outreach programs. “It’s too bad somebody had to die for that, but who knows how it’s going to turn out here,” De Groat said, noting that the area had already “broken records” by becoming the only site ever to be named to the Superfund list twice. “A lot of people don’t see how big this thing really is,” he said. “They dumped the stuff up here, but water goes downstream.”

Here, it seemed, was a man at peace with the fallen world. De Groat stood near his back door and surveyed his surroundings. “What you see right there is what you get,” he said. “All wooded area and streams: beautiful.” A teen-age boy rode by on an A.T.V., while a man across the street siphoned gasoline out of a truck. “I’ll be doing some squirrel hunting maybe on Monday,” he went on. “I’ll take my daughter with me, too. She’s seven, and she’s interested in hunting already.” They had resumed hunting the squirrels, because it turned out that the health advisory was based on a faulty study, in which a lead-based blender was used to analyze the samples. “Now, what scientist, with a brain like that, is going to be looking for lead in an animal, and use something that’s got lead in it to mix things up?” De Groat said, with a grin. “I only went to eighth grade and come out of school and that’s it. And I know better than that.”

Harold Dennison pleaded guilty to weapons charges—for the switchblade, the unregistered handgun, and the hollow-point bullets he’d brought with him on his morning ride—and was given four years’ probation. “Mr. Dennison and other ones may have to find that the life style has changed because of the encroachment of society on what used to be a very remote area of this county in the world,” the judge said at his sentencing. “The Court urges the defendant to use this event as a wake-up call to change his activities in accordance with society’s continual growth into what used to be his boundary areas.”

State Parks Police Officer Chad Walder’s manslaughter trial finally began in June, 2009, and although Dennison was not called as a witness, his name and his gun were invoked frequently by the defense in setting a scene of frightening lawlessness on Stag Hill. “This attack occurred because Mr. Dennison is associated with the people involved,” Walder testified, referring to what he and his lawyer portrayed as a retaliatory ambush by the Manns. But throughout the three weeks of testimony no real attempt was made to explain the nature of that association. (An investigator at one point referred to the Ramapoughs’ tribal lodge as the “Stag Hill Community Center.”) Walder also described Dennison as a “black male,” and, while recounting the lead-up to the shooting, mentioned that he saw “two white males” creeping up behind him.

Instead, the woods themselves seemed to be the central subject of the trial—contrasting notions of a sanctuary despoiled. Robert Galantucci, a defense attorney out of central casting, down to the polished brown-leather shoes, described the German-house area as “naturally beautiful but seriously compromised,” and fixed his witnesses on descriptions of discarded refrigerators and “annoying” exhaust and wounded trees. (“The way they describe it, I’d be afraid to go up there—and I live up there,” Chief Perry told me during a recess, which he was using to complete the Times crossword puzzle.) “It is not one person, one group, one family’s possession,” Galantucci said. “Respect doesn’t have boundaries.”

Not that Chad Walder, from what the jury learned, fit anyone’s image of an earthy forest ranger. A Coast Guard reservist, he said that he’d been called to active duty on September 11, 2001, after spending several years as a corrections officer. He transferred to the parks service, where his wife, Lorna, also worked, less than a year before the shooting; Lorna was the frantic woman whom the utility workers had encountered at the trailhead, urging them to make way for an ambulance. Now forty-five, Chad had close-cropped gray hair and a pallid complexion that suggested a life undone. He hadn’t worked since the incident.

The ranger who first confronted Otis Mann on the slope behind the barn confessed, amid tears, to having urinated in her pants after her pepper spray seemed only to enrage him, and she recalled handing his driver’s license to a sergeant in the aftermath and saying, “If we don’t make it out of here, at least you know who to look for.” (Otis Mann has yet to stand trial for assaulting and attempting to disarm an officer. “I wouldn’t take a plea bargain because the story needs to be told,” he said recently, while asserting his innocence and alleging that the rangers had broken his nose in the fracas. “My life’s a total mess. I don’t sleep.”) Meanwhile, a young woman who’d caught some of the residual pepper spray in her mouth described her own bewildered fear upon emerging from the trails alongside a moaning “Uncle Emil”: “I never seen so many cops in my life.”

The prosecution countered the defense narrative of lawless disrespect with one of forensics. Assistant Prosecutor James Santulli wheeled a painstakingly rendered diorama of the mountain around the courtroom, and called as a witness Dr. Henry Lee, a veteran of the O. J. Simpson and JonBenét Ramsey cases, who testified that he’d found no gunpowder residue on the jean jacket Emil Mann was wearing—an indication, he said, that the shots had been fired from a distance of at least four feet, or beyond arm’s length, thereby challenging Walder’s claim of self-defense.

Once the jury began deliberating, a rumor spread through the courthouse, and onto the Internet, that the tribe was planning a riot in anticipation of bad news. Having noticed the blue ribbons pinned to the shirts of Walder’s supporters, many of the Ramapoughs were displaying white bracelets inscribed with the words “The Fallen Warrior.” Before the verdict was announced, a sergeant-at-arms walked over to the left side of the gallery—the Ramapoughs’ side—and asked, “You guys don’t got glass bottles or anything?” They didn’t, and, upon hearing “not guilty,” they mostly wept, and left without incident. There was no riot, only retreat, and when a reporter from the Record drove up Stag Hill looking for reaction, she was met with slammed doors.

In September, the details of a settlement in the dumping case were leaked: a reported ten million dollars in damages, with no admission of liability by the defendants. (Ford does not deny dumping, but contends that it was far from alone in doing so, and that, moreover, whatever toxins remain in the soil may be related to leftover tailings from the mine operations. The residents’ life style and generally poor health care, it argues, may account for many of the illnesses.) I paid another visit to Roger De Groat and found him sitting on his neighbor’s porch with a couple of younger men, drinking a can of Budweiser. “We were just now talking about that,” he said. “They admit they brought stuff up here but they don’t feel what they brought up here caused any harm. How could you be happy or glad about any part of this?”

Since my visit the previous fall, Lisa Jackson, New Jersey’s former environmental commissioner, had been appointed by President Obama to head the E.P.A. She invited a few of De Groat’s neighbors down to Washington for her swearing-in ceremony, which they took as a sign that their plight would not be forgotten. But the cleanup, in the interim, had stalled, as officials debated the merits of capping the mine holes rather than continuing to excavate, and with the delay came a creeping cynicism. “I mean, they can take as long as they want,” De Groat said, and looked across at a locked gate in front of what the Ramapoughs call Mine Mountain. “That’s why they put that fence down there. They said, ‘Well, we didn’t want people walking through it.’ Who are we talking about? We’ve walked through it all of our lives. So who did you mean?”

The chasm in De Groat’s yard had more than doubled in size in the years since it opened, and he wasn’t sure that it would ever stop spreading. It was now eighty feet deep. But De Groat did have one bit of good news to report: he and his girlfriend had just had a baby girl. “Done deal, that’s it—my ninth one,” he said, as he walked back to his house. “Last of the Mohicans.” ♦

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003.